We've done some extensive research to help illustrate a comparison of traditional manual labor vs automation in the infographic below. We illustrate this example by comparing a production application where the traditional solution to production is adding people to increase output. We compare it to the opportunity of integrating an automated solution and the potential for payback or the Return on Investment (ROI). In this scenario, our customer was using 8 production workers x 2 shifts per day to meet their production goals. This was challenging in a tight labor market and our customer was frequently faced with a shortage of labor.

I had the opportunity to attend the National Robot Safety Conference for Industrial Robots today in Pittsburgh, PA (USA). Today was the first day of a three-day conference. While I mostly cover technical content on this site; I felt that this was an important conference to attend since safety and safety standards are becoming more and more important in robot system design. This conference focused specifically on industrial robots. That means the standards discussed were not directly related to self-driving cars, personal robotics, or space robots (you still don't want to crash into a martian and start an inter-galactic war).

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The North American automation industry has set new records to begin 2016, according to the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), the industry's trade group. The advent of more automation in North American manufacturing promises increased efficiencies in production and the ability to compete globally. A3, whose mission is to advocate and promote automation technologies and ideas that transform the way business is done, tracks the robotics, machine vision and motion control markets for its three daughter associations, Robotic Industries Association (RIA), AIA - Advancing Vision Imaging, and Motion Control & Motor Association (MCMA). A3 is at its highest membership level ever, welcoming 119 new member companies year to date. A3, with its daughter organizations, now represents 965 member companies directly involved with robotics, vision, motion control and motors.

More than half of the human race could be unemployed in 30 years time as job vacancies are filled by machines, a leading computer science has predicted. A life of leisure could be the norm for a majority of people in decades to come, according to Moshe Vardi from Rice University in Houston, Texas. 'We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task,' Professor Vardi told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 'I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?' Last year, robots were ordered and shipped into North America at a record-breaking rate.